Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Stacy King

When he thinks that they are nearing the city of Cairo, where the Ohio river joins the Mississippi, Jim becomes excited and declares that he will regard himself as free the moment they sight Cairo. Petersburg, Missouri, the (fictional) town on the banks of the Mississippi river where both had been living and they have been drifting down the Mississippi on a raft. It involves Huck, a 13 or 14-year old white boy, who has been running away from his abusive, alcoholic father, and Jim, a black adult slave, who has been running away from his owner, Miss Watson. 1 Both focus, for the most part, on a sequence of events that takes place in Chapter 16. Two of these philosophers stand out, in terms of influence: Jonathan Bennett ( 1974) and Nomy Arpaly ( 2002, 2003). Huck Finn’s struggles with his conscience, as depicted in Mark Twain’s famous novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (AHF) ( 1884), have been much discussed by philosophers and various philosophical lessons have been extracted from Twain’s depiction of those struggles.

On it the evasion is understood as an allegory about US race relations during the 20-year period from the end of the US Civil War to the publication of AHF. I rely on an interpretation of AHF that is influential in literary scholarship. This lesson concerns the importance of conscious moral deliberation for moral guidance and for overcoming wrongful moral assumptions. I extract a different philosophical lesson from AHF than either Bennett or Arpaly, which makes sense of the presence of the evasion in AHF. During the evasion Huck behaves in ways that are extremely difficult to reconcile with the interpretations of AHF offered by Bennett and Arpaly. This becomes particularly apparent when we consider the final part of the book, commonly referred to, by literary scholars, as ‘the evasion’. Here I argue that the lessons that Bennett and Arpaly draw are not supported by a careful reading of AHF.

Two of these philosophers stand out, in terms of influence: Jonathan Bennett and Nomy Arpaly. Huck Finn’s struggles with his conscience, as depicted in Mark Twain’s famous novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (AHF) (1884), have been much discussed by philosophers and various philosophical lessons have been extracted from Twain’s depiction of those struggles.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Stacy King